The present application relates generally to an improved data processing apparatus and method and more specifically to mechanisms for providing a sensor composite service based on operational and spatial constraints.
In today's society, environmental sensors are increasingly being used to monitor geospatial conditions. For example, traffic cameras and other traffic sensors are used to monitor roadway conditions, weather sensors are used to monitor weather conditions at various geographical locations, cameras are used for facial recognition to identify persons of interest, sensors for monitoring city operations, utility grids, supply chains, surveillance, and the like, and other cameras and sensors are used to monitor a plethora of other geospatial conditions. These cameras and sensors generate a large amount of time-varying geospatial data. The proliferation of such cameras, sensors, and the like, and the resulting large datasets gathered from these spatially-distributed camera and sensor devices provides unprecedented opportunities for increased situation awareness and effective action-taking by end-user smart applications.
These cameras and sensors (hereafter referred to collectively as “sensors”) are often associated with a plurality of different providers that each may monitor different geospatial regions and may measure different characteristics of a particular geospatial region, e.g., acoustic properties, temperature properties, barometric pressure properties, visual properties, etc. Thus a single geospatial data provider and/or type of sensor may not be able to fulfill the information needs to perform advance analysis and utilization of data.